Well, I’m hoping that everyone had a beautiful Thanksgiving day full of joy, laughter, good food, good drink and the company of good people. Today’s post wraps up a month of posts specially dedicated to GRATITUDE and THANKFULNESS. This is not to say, of course, that I will ever neglect these themes because by now you know I’m a big fan of them both.

My idea for today is to ask you all to think about the three things in life you are most grateful for—“things” being open to interpretation and not just, literally, things. I thought about this quite a bit over the holiday weekend and came up with my list of three. These are in no particular order and all rank evenly as things I am most grateful for:

Health. I am grateful that my family and I have good health and that we live as people who honor and tend to this aspect of our lives with exercise, good food and good thinking.

Love. I am grateful for love…present, past and future. I feel so thankful to have known such love from the many lovely people throughout my life and for the way this love has nurtured me in my journey. I have been very fortunate in this part of my life.

Beauty. I am grateful that our world is full of such beauty and that I get to experience it every day if I just choose to notice, see and feel it. Beauty is everywhere–in grand vistas, in small growing things, in busy cities and funky, unexpected places. It makes each day a gift.

So, that’s my most thankful list. I found that it’s not so easy to trim a life’s worth of gratitude down to only three things but that, in doing so, we can kind of write a personal mission statement for ourselves.

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson